


Valentine's Day for Single Parents

by DeathknightQ



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/M, in this house we love and respect lionel fusco, super not careese friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:55:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26725531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathknightQ/pseuds/DeathknightQ
Summary: Joss has never put any credence in the idea that it’s when you stop looking that you find what you want. (Non-canon compliant.)
Relationships: Joss Carter/Lionel Fusco
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Valentine's Day for Single Parents

_It had all started with helping one of John with one of his Man-in-the-Suit people. Of course. She and Fusco had been driving away from interviewing a witness – a real witness, one from their real job as detectives -- in Fusco’s car. They’d been on their way to meet up with John and take over spying on John’s latest charge. Joss had been holding her phone on the console in between them, with Finch on speakerphone while he filled them in as much as he chose to. A typical day in whatever the Hell this was Carter had signed on for._

_And then…_

”What I don’t get,” Fusco said, “is why Abernathy would even bother--”

“What the Hell?” John interrupted, but his voice didn’t sound like he was on the line. It sounded more distant, tinny, like it was coming from a speaker. John was on a second line, then, and it was weird being able to hear him without him hearing them: usually it was the other way around.

“Mr. Reese! John!” Finch’s voice was suddenly high, tight, and alarmed. “What are you doing? Mr. Reese, stop!” Then the line disconnected.

“Great,” Fusco sighed, flipping on the lights and speeding up.

Joss had worked with the Man in the Suit for almost as long as Fusco, but there were times like this – things Fusco said, the expressions on his face -- when she knew she wasn’t seeing the whole picture. It gave her a chill through her core that had nothing to do with the temperature.

That, and she remembered Finch calling her in the middle of the night, pleading with her to stop John from killing someone because Finch couldn’t. 

Even though she also remembered John had only been taking the wife-beater to rot in Mexican prison and Finch had been over-reacting… Fusco had over-reacted to the idea of Finch being gone, too. Fusco had also been far more relieved than Carter to have Finch back. 

And Fusco was reacting now, chagrined and pissed-off in that Boston beat-cop way of his, and it all made her wonder.

John’s act while being interrogated had been a performance, at least in part, she knew, and a stellar one. How much else of what John was around her was a performance – one of omission, at the very least?

“Does this happen often?”

“What?” Fusco said warily, his hands tight on the wheel.

“You tell me, Fusco!” 

“Not often,” Fusco replied. “Glasses does a pretty good job of keeping Wonderboy on a chain, but every now and then he flies off the handle.”

Joss had just started to parse that when the headlights revealed John’s back – his salt-and-pepper hair and dark coat generic and distinctive at the same time – his arms and legs moving, obviously in the middle of beating the holy Hell out of someone. There was a young woman nearby, coughing and on the phone.

Joss could feel the burn in her lungs as soon as she sprang from the car. The young woman had pepper-sprayed John. But Special Forces, like the Stasi, got sprayed with it so much during training that all it really did afterward was piss them off, and it looked like John had been pretty pissed off to start with.

“Hey!” Joss shouted, hoping her voice would keep John from lashing out on instinct as she and Fusco waded in to haul him off whoever it was. 

“That’s enough,” Fusco said, making a grab for his left arm while Joss aimed for his right. Apparently it worked, or else John had made his point, because he let them pull him off.

His blue eyes were bright, even in the headlights and street lights, and they were wild. His jaw was clenched like lion at the zoo called away from its haunch of beef: willing to be dissuaded, but only just. Controlled, but only so far, and perfectly capable of turning on its trainer given the right incentive.

And then John shook his head a bit, and the look cleared. The fury was still there, but the animal was gone.

“I told you,” John growled, “if he messed with you, he’d answer to me.”

Joss turned, and saw the young woman – her nice dress, her makeup, the fuck-me shoes – help Cal Beecher off the sidewalk. Cal was in a nice suit, no sidearm, and the same burgundy fuck-me shirt he’d worn on their first date.

“Joss?” Cal said.

If asked in court, Joss would have testified that she’d never been as furious as she’d been in that moment.

“I told you,” she snarled at John, both hands on his chest as she shoved him away from Cal, “that there were _boundaries._ I don’t need you to fight my battles for me, or defend my honor, or whatever the Hell you think you’re doing here, and I _want_ you to respect my privacy! No more spying on my dates, no more listening on my phone, and no more beating up my cheating boyfriend. You see my guy with someone else, you tell me and you let me handle it, are we clear?”

“Sure, Joss,” John said. Joss, so he’d seem like a controlling ex-boyfriend to Cal and nothing more.

Joss felt tears sting her eyes. He didn’t mean it. He never meant it and he never listened, not him or Finch either, and even though she accepted it as part of what they did -- and that what they did was good -- she was so tired of it. Tired of feeling powerless, which was ironic, because being tired of feeling powerless was why she’d signed on a second time with this vigilante… 

She still didn’t have a name for it.

Joss turned her back on John.

“Just go,” Fusco said, in his gruffly gentle way, and she could hear him leading John away. “You’ve done enough already, don’t you think?”

“So,” she said to Cal, who had the good grace to look ashamed. “Who’s this?”

“Who’re you?” the young woman asked, her hand on Cal’s arm.

“I’m Jocelyn Carter,” Joss said, matching the woman swagger for swagger. “I’m his girlfriend, or at least I was. But you want his cheating ass? You can have it.”

“Joss, look, I’m sorry,” Cal began.

“Save it.” She wasn’t interested. Her resolution for 2013 had been not to date another douchebag, she’d even friended “I Dated That Douche” on her Facebook for inspiration, and look: already broken. 

Fusco was waiting for her at the car. They’d drive around the block, let the fuss die down before they started watching this Abernathy man. Joss took a deep breath. She could do this. She could do this.

Tomorrow was Valentine’s Day. She’d be spending it with Taylor.

Joss took a shuddering breath. That was fine. What else did the two of them ever need but each other, right?

“I told Wonderboy to stick Glasses with babysitting duty,” Fusco said as she slid inside. “And I told dispatch we were knocking off early. Come on, let’s get you home.”

Home sounded wonderful: pajamas, her fuzzy blanket, watching an action flick with Taylor over pizza, and then pouring her heart out to her Mom after Taylor went to bed. She couldn’t tell her mother specifics about John, but an overprotective fellow detective would be easy enough to fabricate. Enough for her Mom to sympathize, in any case.

“Hey,” Fusco said when they were almost there, “my ex has this hot date tomorrow night, so I’ve got Lee. Why don’t you and Taylor come over? We can order some Chinese food, the boys can beat each other up on the Wii, or maybe the four of us can play some MarioKart. Maybe catch a movie. It’ll be fun. Give your Mom the night off.”

Joss didn’t ask if he’d rather spend the night with Rhonda. Fusco hadn’t said anything about her in a while, so that probably hadn’t worked out. It was too bad.

“A pity date?” Joss asked, smiling in spite of herself.

“Never,” Fusco said firmly. “We’ll call it Valentine’s Day for Single Parents. Glasses and Wonderboy not invited.”

“All right. I’ll bring drinks.”

* * *

They arrested Abernathy for extortion the next afternoon.

Joss swung by a liquor store after work, picking up some soda for the boys and Hot Damn to put in cocoa for her and Fusco. Then she ran home to change and pick up Taylor. The unending shame of spending the evening with one of his mom’s friends and said friend’s younger son had been ameliorated by promise of a night on a Wii, which Carter refused to buy.

They set the boys up with choosing something from Fusco’s DVD collection (one case for kids, one for adults) and set about ordering food. They decided that “and” was a better conjugation than “or” in this case, and ordered one of everyone’s favorites, including the kids’.

The only hitch in the evening was when the delivery man dropped off the food he told them it was already paid for in full, including tip.

“Fuck that guy,” Fusco muttered as he closed the door with his foot, his and Joss’s hands both full with bags full of paper boxes filled with steaming deliciousness. Joss was starving.

“Who? Finch?”

“Who else could it be?” Fusco groused, too quietly for the bickering boys to hear. “‘Hey, sorry I lost control of the shell-shocked lunatic I loaded up with a bunch of untraceable weapons and set loose on the streets of New York, and he beat up your boyfriend because he cheated on you, so now you have to spend Valentine’s Day with Fusco.’” Fusco looked at her sternly. “You better not refuse to eat this just because Glasses paid for it.”

It was tempting, and once she would have, but now…

“I’ll consider it apology accepted.”

“Good, because this’d be cold by the time whatever I ordered you got here.”

Joss was a little surprised by that. Not that he would, Fusco was nothing if not loyal to a fault, but the matter-of-fact way he said it. Like it was obvious her preference should be respected even if Fusco didn’t share it.

Maybe she’d accepted Finch’s apology, but she was clearly was still sore at John. 

“Now, give me your phone,” Fusco said, holding his hand out. He pulled the battery from her phone as soon as Joss handed it over, and then did the same with his.

“Okay, we picked one,” Taylor said, coming into the kitchen with a brightly-colored case.

“Eye-noo-what?” Joss said, trying to read the case, which featured a man in a red suit with dog ears and a girl in a Catholic School uniform.

“Inuyasha,” Fusco corrected as he dished out the Chinese food onto plain dinner plates. “Anime, Japanese cartoons, but for teenagers and adults. It’s good. Takes some getting used to, but good.”

Joss had a kid. She knew that tone of voice intimately: as a parent, you had a lot of things your kid liked grow on you as a survival technique. It was either that or let the distance destroy your relationship.

The movie was good, just the right blend of action and drama, and as soon as it was over the boys set in on the games. Fusco insisted on one round of four-way game of MarioKart (Lee did a pretty good job of trouncing them all, which raised his status in Taylor’s eyes considerably), and then the boys were let loose on the console. Around nine Fusco cracked open the ice cream, and they switched back to another movie. This time Joss got to pick. She opted for the least-gory of the Indiana Jones movies. The boys got pillows and blankets on the floor to ward off the slight chill in the apartment, while Joss and Fusco had their own blankets on the couch.

The boys passed out from the sugar crash in the middle of the film, leaving Fusco and Joss to their cocoa in relative peace. Joss would wait for the Hot Damn to bleed from her system, and then wake up Taylor and head home.

“What’cha thinking?” Fusco asked, glancing at her out of the side of his vision. “I can hear the gears grinding from over here.”

Joss looked down at her cup.

“I don’t know where to start.”

“You could start by calling me Lionel. You know, if you want to.”

Joss looked up. Fusco’s – Lionel’s -- face was open. Listening.

“‘Shell-shocked lunatic,’” Joss said, because it had been bothering her all night no matter how fun spending time with the kids was – like an actual family, like before Taylor’s father had died in Camp Davis while she’d been off in Iraq.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” Fusco said, shifting on the couch. “I know you’re a Vet, I didn’t mean it that way--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Joss said, waving off his apology. She traced the edge of her mug with her fingertips. This was the part she hadn’t been able to tell her mother. “I met him before, you know? He _was_ a shell-shocked lunatic: homeless, alcoholic, hadn’t taken a shower in a month, crazy old man beard. All of it, every ‘Nam vet stereotype you ever heard. And his eyes – he wanted to die, Lionel. And not a bullet to the head: slow and painful. I’ve seen guys like that before. I tried to reach out, get him some help. But he was having none of it. Gave me his fingerprints like he was daring me to run ‘em and—And then this fancy lawyer came in and made us let him go. I saw him get into this shiny car and then… the next time I see him he’s cleaned up and running around like he’s Jesus Christ with an uzi. At first I thought he was playing God, but the more—I have no idea where the Hell they’re getting their information, but it is right every time.”

It was the only reason she could justify what they did: they were doing the right thing in the most massively wrong way imaginable, but they weren’t like regular vigilantes. They weren’t flying completely blind with only their own prejudices, perceptions, and self-importance to guide them. Their intel wasn’t complete, but it was solid… and completely inadmissible in court.

Which was why they needed Reese. And why they needed her and Lionel, to take advantage of the situations John created to nail the riffraff for whatever charges would stick.

That was the other reason she went along with it: John and Finch weren’t handing out assassinations. If they could send the bad guys to jail, they would. Just… creatively.

But Donnelly was still right: it was illegal as Hell.

Joss pressed her hand to her forehead.

Illegal as Hell, and intrusive as fuck. Neither of them abided by due process, by any sort of privacy protection, and last night had proven that.

But this wasn’t about principle. She wanted to pretend it was, but it wasn’t. She’d crossed the line a long time ago, squared herself with the wrong way they did this right thing, and made her peace with the fact that sometimes it wasn’t best to choose lawful over good.

“And?” Lionel prompted.

“I told him not to listen to Cal and I, to stay out of it. I mean, who does he think he is, going batshit on Beecher like that? I thought he was getting _better_.”

“Better as in ‘not as batshit as he used to be,’ yeah,” Lionel said pragmatically. “But ‘better’ as in ‘cured’? No way. And as san _er_ as he is now, if Glasses leaves or gets killed? That all goes away. Except it’ll be worse. If Glasses leaves, then it’ll be homeless and drinking again, but if he gets killed? It’ll be a killing spree and suicide by cop.

“I know you’ve got a thing for bad boys, Joss, and I get it. I used to go the ‘hot mess’ route myself. It’s how I ended up here,” Lionel gestured to the apartment, though Joss knew he meant the divorce and partial-custody of his son. “The idea that underneath all the bitchy and badass there’s this sane, stable person you can have a healthy, normal relationship with – it’s a fantasy. Broken people are _broken_ , and only other broken people can handle it without going crazy.”

“I never said I liked bad boys,” Joss whispered, her voice shaking. What Lionel was saying was true, but it didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

John was smoking hot, and he was a good man who put his life on the line to protect people he’d never even met before.

But he was also the wild animal she’d pulled off of Cal, and the desperately codependent man she’d accompanied to Texas. And maybe the pining John had displayed in prison had been less of an act than she’d thought.

And Cal was a good cop, but he was also a player.

Lionel rested a comforting hand on her cheek.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s the value of the ‘good girls.’”

Oh. _Oh._

_**Oh.** _

“Shit,” Lionel said, because he saw in her face that he’d tipped his cards. He drew his hand back. “Look, Carter,” Carter, not Joss, “you don’t have to—I mean, I get it, I _live_ in the Friendzone, it’s fine. I just. You’re amazing, you know? Guy can’t help himself.” Lionel looked down at his mug, his face flushed a deep crimson.

He was a good man, loyal to a fault. He gave a shit. He listened. And he was handsome, too, in his own way: strong jaw, nice cheekbones, eyes as lovely as John’s if filled with bulldog determination instead of sparkling with danger.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned,” Joss said, because it was true and because she was done with bad boys and their bullshit as of this moment, “it’s the value of ‘good boys.’”

Lionel looked up.

Joss leaned forward, and Lionel met her halfway. He always met her halfway.

He tasted like cinnamon and chocolate, warm and hesitant and soft, and then with growing confidence.

Lionel pulled away first, and Joss was fine with that because both of their kids were sleeping on the floor. But she was still warmed to her toes.

“Well,” Lionel said. “Dinner, next Tuesday?”

“Absolutely.”


End file.
